Sword of the Saints: Sinner Chapter Four

Like the seven winged bearer of light rising from the deepest throes of endless Erebus, he shined in the undifferentiated dark like sparkling starlight, tawny mane fluttering in an imaginary wind reflected upon only his unblemished features. Time seemed to slow, time seemed to crawl, and time seemed to cease as slowly he ascended the ashen and grimy staircase at the head of the starving and insatiate damned, doomed to live evermore—according to the firmament’s canon—eking out a miserable existence underneath the unfeeling tread of the living, persecuted for merely being on the wrong side of fate while the common man and the abbot both call it “justice.” The sailors were dumbstruck, weapons held only limply in their crinkled hands, having already long forgotten the miserable death of their leader and employer, whose head even now tumbled back and forth upon the shit-riddled deck, reverberating through the timbers as its fractured fence of the mouth rolled to and fro. His smile was remarkable, his teeth shining white, his cheeks a-glow with genuine crimson; they nearly threw down their weapons then and there. But he wouldn’t stop, climbing at a resting rate ever closer, step-by-step, as all and one were universally held firm, only able to address his approach with the twinkling glimmer of their awe-struck eyes dilated almost entirely black.

He laid his hand upon the foremost’s shoulder like father and son, and reproachfully withdrew the man’s battered and half-rusted hewing spear once clasped tightly in hand, but before the man’s eyes could again address his face, the armored knuckles of the cavalier’s free hand collided with the force of typhoon, rendering concave utterly the whole of his face, and as if stricken by lightning, the man fell down there at once dead.

All thoughts turned at once to flight, but he was already heaving forward their whole host under the length of his liberated hewing spear, untowardly mighty and emboldened with the pedagogical fury of the daylight bronze that robs midnight. And as he rose above decks, the sky smiled again to see him, and he hurled a full score of men backwards, who fell helpless to be the prey of his lethal lacerations to stain his gauntlets crimson bright.

But he did not relent and lunged on ahead, the collapsed to be the prey of the eager hordes throbbing with the unimaginable fury of the enslaved.

His first succeeding opponent, unarmored and unprepared, fell down dead, bludgeoned lethally through the lungs with the reverse stroke of his haft. Another, terrified stiff, he smote down to hell with a draw across his carotid that sprayed his immediate companions in a spurting shower of his essential ichor.

But a third found his wits, casting forward with the poorly constructed blade of a sailor’s dirk, but erring of his target he was fortunate to just very nearly turn the eerily concise and immediate counterstroke of his opponent’s spear intended for the yokes of his head. Nevertheless the cavalier was a talented fencer, abounding in ruses, and the rebounding point lodged in the throat of the sailor’s immediate compatriot staggering in a wild-eyed jig before slumping to the rollicking floor. Unnerved, but not to be outdone, the sailor lunged once again for the undefended face of his striking assailant, only to collapse upon the point of split wood, the haft in the cavalier’s hands smitten in a moment of need.